20100726

I know I had said I would be trying to post some of the ideas I had at The Next HOPE but The past week has seen me rather distracted from that goal. Aside from trying to recover physically (turns out a 3:1 ratio of Club Mate to water over the course of a weekend isn't such a good idea) trying to catch up on the news (particularly the 2600/HOPE/OTH related stuff I had missed in the runup to and during the conference) and then catching up on the new release of my primary Linux distro.

That last item has probably been the largest source of delays and distractions as they had made a few changes that seriously screwed with my graphics drivers (eliminating SaX2 and introducing the Neauvou drivers as the new default) which lead to a couple of days of madly trying to hand configure my xorg.conf and so on, prompting an additional change of desktop. The last chapter in that was the change from multiple independent NICs to bonded NICs, complicated by some odd configuration issues (gateway settings getting lost randomly) and one of the cards randomly dropping out and loosing it's kernel module declarations. I had thought that that card had finally crapped itself as it had become entirely non responsive after an attempt to move it to a different physical bus which lead to me purchasing a replacement this afternoon ($23 isn't bad for a gigabit NIC of known origins in New York). In the process of installing the new card I noticed that the previous card had been non responsive because it had been incorrectly seated (hard to do with a PCI connector). So bond0 now has three slaves eth0-2, all running at Gigabit speeds, which I think is about the appropriate level of overkill for my lousy DSL modem.

Then there was the idea of running a Tor node on the same workstation, not exactly well suited to NYC's anemic residential DSL connections (seriously, 300kbps upstream is the best you can do Verizon?) but having listened to a recording of the Wikileaks keynote from HOPE I figured I should try to contribute to the larger community more. It turns out that I always forget about the pseudo-firewall built into most SOHO routers, a fact that eluded me for a couple of hours. But I'm now providing a Tor relay, even if my available bandwidth is pretty lousy. Maybe I'll set one up on my station at work too, the T3 doesn't get much of a workout on weekends.

Now that things on those fronts have calmed down I might actually get myself to write something a bit more thought provoking.

20100720

I think I have now almost completely physically recovered from my experiences at The Next HOPE (my back still doesn't seem happy about sleeping on the mezanine floor Sunday). Even though I spent most of my time there hawking Club-Mate it was a great time and I want to thank a few people in particular: Flo and Ragnar for helping me at the Mate stand when I needed the breaks, Neo Amsterdam for including me in the cast of 26 o'clock (I will link when the Statler archives are available), Thurmon (not sure if that is spelled right) and Nick Farr for keeping an eye on me when the lack of sleep and the tainted water got to me, and Robert Steele for being a good neighbor in the Vendor Area.I'm sure there are a few more people I should be thanking here but the names and reasons escape me at the moment.I have a few ideas for posts that have come out of the experience an I will try to get those up as well soon.

For now though, thanks again to everyone who made The Next HOPE the experience it was.

About Me

Before you ask I’m not, to use Voltair’s phrasing, “that kind of hacker”. I’m not a scripter or skiddie or what ever you want to call those sorts of idiots; nor am I “that kind of hacker“, I’m not a black hat, cracker or any of the other names you might have for the people who give hackers and hacking a bad name.
What I am is a reasonably knowledgeable, talented and opinionated child of the ‘information’ or ‘computer’ age. I am an infovore with a desire to learn and know and do. I am a technologist (and have been since I was allowed to use my parents’ computer back in the 80’s. I am an explorer, a researcher and a student of the electronic world.
If you don’t like what I have to say, there is the rest of the Web for you to go to; if you disagree with me, at least try to mount a half-way decent argument based on facts.
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